Redliners(80)

The vines that entered the ship terminated in bunches of fruit the size of soccer balls, hundreds of them. Grenade blasts had crushed them to reeking pulp against the bulkheads.

The fruit could be of no benefit to the plant, but they'd served as food for the creature. It must have entered through the same opening as the strikers, then grown to its final monstrous size on the diet.

The remains of at least twenty Spooks lay in a fetid mass at the bottom of the compartment. Each body had been bitten in half but not devoured. The creature was a killer without being a carnivore.

The four companionways to the deck above were horizontal tunnels. The interdeck hatches had buckled and couldn't close. Abbado scrambled after Caldwell in the lowest passageway. The steep, narrow treads were vertical obstacles.

The leading strikers hurled half a dozen electrical grenades to clear the third and highest deck. Abbado, panting and dizzy, entered a moment later. There were Kalendru bodies among jumbled gear. The Spooks had been killed in the crash a week or so earlier.

"Nobody left, sarge," Horgen said in faint disappointment. 3-3'd hoped for a fight with something the strikers understood, not leaves and vines. Learning there were no Spooks alive in the ship was like being bilked of a steak dinner after a week of living on lettuce.

The compartment and the one below showed no indication of occupancy following the crash. If Spooks had initially survived, the creature had seen them off. The length of its neck and tongue would have permitted it to scour both levels even though its swollen body couldn't fit through the companionway. There were lasers among the other debris, but ordinary Kalendru troops didn't carry weapons heavy enough to deal with a monster the size of that one.

"You know . . ." Flea said. "I could almost feel sorry for the poor bastard Spooks."

"All right, let's get back," Abbado said. "They'll need us at the column."

The crash had thrown loose personal gear which covered the compartment's lower side like plant debris in a forest swale. It was within the realm of possibility that a Spook was hiding deep enough in it that IR didn't spot him, but it wasn't worth 3-3's time to check out.

"Three-three, this is Administrator Tamara Lundie," said an unfamiliar voice. Because the helmet AIs had to fill gaps caused by signal attenuation through the ship's metal hull, the words were almost toneless. "Kalendru vessels of this class have a separate control room reached through a hatch here—"

A deck schematic with a pulsing caret appeared briefly on one quadrant of Abbado's visor.

"—which is at the moment concealed by litter from the crash. Out."

"Who the hell was that?" Caldwell asked.

"The blonde with the broomstick up her ass," Abbado said, straddle-walking forward to keep his balance on the shifting surface. He tossed aside a pile of torn containers, Spook dufflebags or bedrolls, to expose the hatch where Lundie said it would be.

It was locked from the other side, but cloth pinched on the lower side of the hatch showed it'd been open at some point after the crash. Judging from tears and blast patterns, 3-3's grenades had flung the gear that hid it.

Abbado unscrewed the warhead of a rocket, set it for point effect/five second delay, and struck it hard enough against the lock plate to trip the fuze. "Fire in the hole!" he called as he scrambled away.

The blue flash of the electrical warhead lit the compartment. The shock wave clanged into the hatch like the tip of a three-ton ice-pick, shearing the bolt and flinging the panel open in reaction. Tattered debris flew up in a cloud like dirt tamped around a charge set in an excavation.

"I've got him!" Horgen cried even as she dived through the hatchway. "I've got him and he's alive!"



Caius Blohm watched the foliage react to the single, sharp blast that made the wreck's hull ring. Leaves quivered, pods turned; the whole forest was listening, waiting.

"I've got him! I've got him and he's alive!"

Foley looked at the opening above him, desperate to join the rest of his squad. Sergeant Gabrilovitch nodded to Blohm and muttered, "Great. Now we've got a prisoner to nursemaid back to the column."

"He won't be any more problem than Abbado's lot," Blohm said. And not much more problem than you, Gabe, he thought, but he didn't say.

"C41," broke in the voice that this time didn't bother to identify itself as Tamara Lundie. "Increased carbon dioxide levels suggest that another party of native humanoids coming from the north is now within a few seconds or minutes of the column. The region between the first and second tractor appears the most likely point of contact. Out."

Blohm felt his body prickle. He had a vision of Mirica in the grip of a humanoid with a face as remote and remorseless as a storm cloud; of Mirica dead, not on a jungle track but on the threshold of a room filled with the grenade-blasted bodies of other children. He began to shiver.